Wikipedia entries or handing out free laptops to bloggers is on the cutting edge of marketing communications? How about inventing IT industry analyst marketshare figures for a market segment that hasn't even been measured? Case in point: A reader of Microsoft's Sunday, Jan. 21 press release paragraphs could conclude that Microsoft already dominates the Unified Communications integrated collaborative market segment with 52% share, according to IDC, a reputable IT research firm. Trouble is, IDC has not yet determined vendor market share for this segment, nor has estimated the size of the "integrated collaborative" market. To top it off, IDC hasn't even established a taxonomy for the "integrated collaborative" market segment!(Microsoft even mixed in Social Software capabilities into the same paragraph, just to sound trendy, I guess.)

So did Microsoft fix their "error?" Rather than distributing a new version of its press release over PR Newswire (which distributed the original press release) to correct these innaccuracies. Microsoft simply updated a copy of the press release posted on its press room web site, with the words, "Editors’ update, Jan. 24, 2007 – This press release has been edited since original publication." -- without any explanation about what was wrong. See: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/jan07/01-21LotusDominoTransitionPR.mspx

Of course, journalist don't check press releases on vendor press sites to see if they've changed. Then again, Microsoft could again be blazing a new trail in marketing communications ; )

Many governments have proceeded further, with adoption of Linux as the operating system of choice.

Let us take India for example: The state of Kerala moved 12500 schools to Linux few months back. The State of Tamil Nadu home to a population the size of the UK, is in the process of deploying 32,600 Linux desktop systems and training 30,000 government officials (http://mandriva.blogspot.com/2007/01/tamil-nadu-india-may-shut-door-on.html ). The governments of seven states, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal were running their treasury applications on Linux. The Provident Fund application of Bihar, the Secretariat in Mizoram, the Stamp Duty application in Andhra Pradesh, the Land Record application of Maharashtra, the RTOs of all the North Eastern states; Linux found several takers in many states across the country. The Central Government was not lagging behind-the innovative ePost project of the Post & Telegraph department, the IndiaGov portal and various other applications of the Election Commission, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Labor and Ministry of External Affairs were also running open source software. (http://www.dqindia.com/content/DQTop20_2006/employers06/2006/106090601.asp ).

Meanwhile, in Europe, the city of Amsterdam (in collaboration with 7 other cities) will conduct tests of open source software on desktops in two departments in the first half of 2007 (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39285307,00.htm ). Austria's capital city Vienna is in the midst of linux desktop rollout.